Review: '22 Jump Street' is a repeat

By Chris Nashawaty, EW

Updated 12:00 PM ET, Fri June 13, 2014

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Hollywood's best bromances – When you start a band together, it's a special kind of bromance. Big Boi and Andre 3000 have been at it for over 20 years. We just hope to see a new OutKast album one of these days.

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Hollywood's best bromances15 photos

Hollywood's best bromances – Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are the poster boys of bromance. In fact, when Affleck was cast as Batman, there were jokes about Damon playing Robin. After their Oscar-winning script for "Good Will Hunting," the pair continued to work together in movies like "Dogma." Now they have teamed up again for Syfy thriller "Incorporated." See more of our favorite male besties ...

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Hollywood's best bromances15 photos

Hollywood's best bromances – Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are a winning pair on and off the big screen. The "21 Jump Street" co-stars and off-screen pals are reviving their bromance with the comedy "22 Jump Street," which opens June 13. Of their bond, Tatum told CNN, "we just got really lucky."

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Hollywood's best bromances15 photos

Hollywood's best bromances – Co-workers and good friends, "X-Men" stars Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart have perfected the art of the bromance. In a new interview with AARP magazine, McKellen said that Stewart is "straightforward," but "his nature is a very sweet one. And we spend much of our time laughing." The way all bros should.

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Hollywood's best bromances15 photos

Hollywood's best bromances – Kanye West and Jay-Z go way back. West was a producer on Jay-Z's albums 13 years ago, and Jay-Z returned the favor, appearing on West's albums. The ultimate collaboration came in 2011 with the pair's wildly successful album "Watch the Throne."

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Hollywood's best bromances15 photos

Hollywood's best bromances – Though they may have played enemies on "Lost," Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson ("Person of Interest") became good friends while filming the show. Emerson told CNN, "We were both the oldest guys on that show. We had many more things in common: small town Midwestern backgrounds, and we both moved to big cities to pursue the unlikely dream of being an actor. We both ended up accidentally on a big series. We had some of the same work habits. We had so many things in common." The pair hope to work together again in the future.

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Hollywood's best bromances – For some fans, the relationship and competition between Blake Shelton and Adam Levine are big reasons to watch "The Voice." The show has played up the pair's bromance, but that hasn't made them less competitive, often needling each other along the way. Levine won the first season and Shelton has won every season since.

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Hollywood's best bromances – The film "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" was one of the highlights of a beautiful friendship between Robert Redford (right) and the late Paul Newman. They worked together again in "The Sting." When Newman died in 2008, Redford spoke at length about their relationship, praising Newman's social responsibility and his sense of fun.

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Hollywood's best bromances – Any fan of "Zoolander" will tell you just how great Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson work together. The pair turned up again in "The Royal Tenenbaums," "Starsky & Hutch" and the "Meet the Parents" films.

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Hollywood's best bromances – Most people first met Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau in the 1996 hit independent film "Swingers." Sure, Vaughn had his Owen Wilson comedies and Favreau had his "Iron Man" movies but these two have kept working together in everything from "Four Christmases" to "Couples Retreat."

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Hollywood's best bromances – Their bromance didn't start with "The Great Gatsby." Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio go back to the late 1980s. While doing press for the movie this summer, Maguire called DiCaprio "one of my best friends." All together now: Awww...

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Hollywood's best bromances – Brad Pitt and George Clooney always seemed to have a blast making those "Ocean's" movies, and the fun has just continued for these two. Clooney even name-dropped Pitt in his Golden Globes acceptance speech last year.

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Hollywood's best bromances – You just thought that "Scrubs" characters Turk and J.D.'s "Guy Love" was only on-screen. It turns out that Donald Faison and Zach Braff are besties in real life, singing Christmas carols, one hosting the other's wedding at their home, the whole bit. So of course they had to reunite on Faison's TV Land show.

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Hollywood's best bromances – As soon as Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake did "The Barry Gibb Talk Show" on "Saturday Night Live" -- and couldn't help but crack each other up -- you knew it was a bromance waiting to happen. Timberlake is now basically a regular on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon," most recently as part of "Timberlake Tuesdays" this September.

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Hollywood's best bromances – Since their "Freaks and Geeks" days, Seth Rogen and James Franco seem to make every effort to work together, most famously in "Pineapple Express," and most recently in "This is the End." They'll return in the upcoming comedy about North Korea (yes, you read that right) titled "The Interview."

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Story highlights

Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill revive their roles

The film is very similar to "21 Jump Street"

The similarities is a running joke in the movie

If you loved "21 Jump Street," you're in luck: The sequel, "22 Jump Street," is the exact same movie.

Since the first film was such a fast and fizzy buddy-cop bromance, that's not the worst news in the world. But it is a bit of a disappointment. Reprising their Mutt-and-Jeff routine, Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum play undercover narcs Schmidt and Jenko, who are assigned to go back to school and pose as students to sniff out a drug ring. Sound familiar?

Only this time, instead of high school, they're dumped on a college campus, and the drug is a deadly synthetic mix of Ecstasy and Adderall called WHYPHY. ''Do the same thing as last time and everyone will be happy,'' their pencil-pushing supervisor (Nick Offerman) tells the fellas at the outset. And that's precisely what they do, beat for beat, for the next two hours. To cover up the script's lack of originality, screenwriters Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman pummel us with a string of self-aware meta-commentary jokes that poke fun at bloated sequels. It's as if they're trying to beat viewers to the realization that we're being peddled sloppy seconds. But just because the writers repeatedly elbow the audience in the ribs about how cynical sequels are doesn't make their approach any less cynical.

It's a good thing, then, that Hill and Tatum continue to have such great chemistry. Hill's neurotic-motormouth act and Tatum's lovable-lunkhead shtick still shoot giddy sparks. After kicking off with a ridiculously over-the-top action-flick sequence, the guys show up at their swanky new HQ in an old Vietnamese church across the street from their previous digs (hence the new address in the title). Their barking captain, played with hard-a** menace by Ice Cube, informs them that he's enrolling them at MC State, where they'll pretend to be the most genetically mismatched siblings since Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Twins."

Adding some supporting-cast spice are comedians Kenny and Keith Lucas as a pair of narcoleptically chill identical twins who live across the hall and Jillian Bell as a sarcastic grump who spews acid insults about how old Schmidt and Jenko look. One of the unexpected treats of the first film was the positioning of the Abercrombie-sculpted Tatum as the unpopular loser and the brainy sack of mashed potatoes Hill as the BMOC. Here, the roles are reversed: Tatum bros down with some football-stud frat boys, while Hill is shunned and forced to hang with an emo crowd that includes a beautiful coed (Amber Stevens) he meets when he does a bonkers poetry-slam number that earns him the (untimely) nickname Maya Angelou (see sidebar). The spoken-word bit culminates in one of the film's best moments: a walk-of-shame gag in which Hill exchanges embarrassed glances with female classmates making the morning-after walk across the quad. The movie could've used more cracked scenes like that one.

Instead, "22 Jump Street" lazily milks the undercover brothers' codependency for gay-panic punchlines (enough already). They bicker. They break up. They go their separate ways. (Cue John Waite's ''Missing You.'') Tatum then finds a new target for his homoerotic double entendres in the alpha-male quarterback Zook, played by Wyatt (son of Kurt) Russell. As the tired investigation spins its wheels to a spring-break climax in Mexico, the movie nearly morphs into a slack installment in the "Bad Boys" franchise, complete with shootouts, chases, and even a fiery helicopter explosion. On the plus side, it also gives us more of Bell's delirious deadpan misanthropy.

I don't want to give the impression that I didn't laugh at times. I did — especially during the film's inspired end-credits tease of future Jump Street installments. But I've come to expect more from directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have been on a roll with the cult TV series "Clone High," the first "Jump Street," and most recently "The LEGO Movie." The merry-prankster duo have a real knack for cheeky pop culture mischief and placing clever new spins on shopworn properties. I get that with sequels, moviegoers are, to some extent, asking to see more of the same. But does the same have to feel quite so samey? Grade: B-